I was born in Poonch (Kashmir) and now I live in Norway. I oppose war and violence and am a firm believer in the peaceful co-existence of all nations and peoples. In my academic work I have tried to espouse the cause of the weak and the oppressed in a world dominated by power politics, misleading propaganda and violations of basic human rights. I also believe that all conscious members of society have a moral duty to stand for and further the cause of peace and human rights throughout the world.

Saturday, June 09, 2012

Be assured of one thing: whichever candidate you choose at the polls
in November, you aren’t just electing a president of the United States;
you are also electing an assassin-in-chief. The last two presidents may
not have been emperors or kings, but they — and the vast
national-security structure that continues to be built-up and
institutionalized around the presidential self — are certainly one of
the nightmares the founding fathers of this country warned us against.
They are one of the reasons those founders put significant war powers in
the hands of Congress, which they knew would be a slow, recalcitrant,
deliberative body.

Thanks to a long New York Times piece
by Jo Becker and Scott Shane, “Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of
Obama’s Principles and Will,” we now know that the president has spent
startling amounts of time overseeing the “nomination” of terrorist
suspects for assassination via the remotely piloted drone program he inherited from President George W. Bush and which he has expanded exponentially.
Moreover, that article was based largely on interviews with “three
dozen of his current and former advisers.” In other words, it was
essentially an administration-inspired piece — columnist Robert Scheer calls it
“planted” — on a “secret” program the president and those closest to
him are quite proud of and want to brag about in an election year.

“Drone attacks do raise serious questions about compliance with
international law,” Navi Pillay told a news conference in Islamabad.

“I see the indiscriminate killings and injuries of civilians in any
circumstances as human rights violations,” she said, adding that,
“Because these attacks are indiscriminate it is very, very difficult to
track the numbers of people who have been killed.”

“I suggested to the government [of Pakistan] that they invite the
United Nations Special Rapporteur on Summary or Arbitrary Executions and
he will be able to investigate some of the incidents.”

The deliberate targeting of rescuers and mourners by CIA drones was first exposed by the Bureau in February 2012, in a major joint investigation with the Sunday Times.
On more than a dozen occasions between 2009 and June 2011, the CIA
attacked rescuers as they tried to retrieve the dead and injured.
Although Taliban members were killed on almost every occasion, so too
were civilians – many of whom the Bureau’s field investigators were able
to name. The investigation also reported that on at least three
occasions the CIA had struck funeral-goers.

From statements made in February by the families of victims and
survivors of a March 17, 2011, drone attack in the village of Datta Khel
in the Pakistani region of North Waziristan. The statements were
collected by the British human rights group Reprieve and were included
in their lawsuit challenging the legal right of the British government
to aid the United States in its drone campaign. More than half of all
deaths from U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan have occurred in North
Waziristan. Translated from the Pashto.

I am approximately forty-six years old, though I do not know the exact date of my birth. I am a malice
of my tribe, meaning that I am a man of responsibility among my people.
One of my brother’s sons, Din Mohammed, whom I was very fond of, was
killed by a drone missile on March 17, 2011. He was one of about forty
people who died in this strike. Din Mohammed was twenty-five years old
when he died. These men were gathered together for a jirga, a
gathering of tribal elders to solve disputes. This particular jirga was
to solve a disagreement over chromite, a mineral mined in Waziristan. My
nephew was attending the jirga because he was involved in the transport
and sale of this mineral. My brother, Din Mohammed’s father, arrived at
the scene of the strike shortly following the attack. He saw death all
around him, and then he found his own son. My brother had to bring his
son back home in pieces. That was all that remained of Din Mohammed.

As the latest US attacks kill
17 and threaten to destabilise Pakistan, the president could be the
cruellest political hoax of our times

Barack Obama, according to Foreign Policy magazine, “has become George W Bush on steroids”. Armed with a “kill list”,
the Nobel peace laureate now hosts “Tuesday terror” meetings at the
White House to discuss targets of drone attacks in Pakistan and at least
five other countries. The latest of these killed 17 people near the border with Afghanistan today .

Unlike the slacker Bush, who famously disdained specifics, Obama
routinely deploys his Ivy League training in law. Many among the dozens
of “suspected militants” massacred by drones in the last three days in
northwestern Pakistan are likely to be innocent. Reports gathered by
NGOs and Pakistani media about previous attacks speak of a collateral
damage running into hundreds, and deepening anger and hostility to the
United States. No matter: in Obama’s legally watertight bureaucracy,
drone attacks are not publicly acknowledged; or if they have to be,
civilian deaths are flatly denied and all the adult dead categorised as
“combatants”.

Wednesday, June 06, 2012

They call them the ‘Terror Tuesday’ meetings. Held in the Situation
Room in the bowels of the White House, they are chaired by President
Barack Obama and include up to two dozen intelligence and
counter-terrorism officials.

Their purpose is to consider which of America’s enemies should be placed on the White House’s ‘kill list’.

After viewing what officials jocularly call ‘baseball cards’, which
contain terror suspects’ biographies, the pros and cons of their
continued existence on earth are debated.

Long-distance killer: More and more drone missile attacks are being sanctioned by President Barack Obama

Like a latter-day Roman emperor sitting in life-or-death judgment on
his gladiators, Obama then pronounces on the fate of each suspect.

“No, Charlotte, I’m the jury now. I sentence you to death.”The roar of the .45 shook the room. Charlotte staggered back a step.“How c-could you?” she gasped.“It was easy.”
- Mickey Spillane, I, The Jury

The news that Barack Obama — a Constitutional scholar and recipient
of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize — has taken personal charge of lethal US
drone hits in Yemen and Pakistan is one of those stories that takes time
to sink in.

The New York Times
stresses how serious the issue has become. “With China and Russia
watching, the United States has set an international precedent for
sending drones over borders to kill enemies.” It’s no longer a cool
video-game experiment; it’s the beginning of robot warfare, and, if
history is a lesson, it will have unanticipated consequences and our
enemies will learn to counter the weapon with imaginative weapons of
their own, including drones. We should expect to be surprised and
blindsided. Martin Luther King spoke of it as a futile rising cycle of
violence.

Exactly how many non-combatants and innocent people are being killed
is the big question. There’s no way to know. One, there’s a pathological
level of secrecy in our militarized government and, two, we can’t
believe a word the government says anyway.

Sunday, June 03, 2012

The Houla Massacre of
a week ago in several small Muslim villages near the Syrian city of
Homs underscores the tragic circumstances of a civilian vulnerability to
brutal violence of a criminal government. Most of the 108 civilians who
died in Houla were executed at close range in cold blood, over 50 of
whom were children under the age of 10. It is no wonder that the Houla
Massacre is being called ‘a tipping point’ in the global response to
Syrian violence that started over 15 months ago.

The chilling nature of this vicious attack upon the most innocent
among us, young children, seems like a point of no return. What happened
in Houla, although still contested, seems confirmed as the mainly the
work of the Shabiha, the notorious militia of thugs employed by Damascus to deal cruelly with opposition forces and their supposed supporters.

This massacre also represents a crude rebuff of UN diplomacy, and the
ceasefire its 280 unarmed observers were monitoring since it was put
into effect on April 12. In this regard the events in Houla reinforced
the impression that the Assad regime was increasingly relying on tactics
of depraved criminality and state terror to destroy the movement that
has been mounted against it. Such defiance also challenged the UN and
the international community to do more when confronted by such evil, or
face being further discredited as inept and irrelevant.

Saturday, June 02, 2012

Editor’s Note:
In his article Hassan Gardezi shows how Pakistan became known as the ‘Islamic
republic’. The information he provides is of historical value and worthy
of serious discussion. Any state system that is based on any revealed
religion is basically a theocracy where the immutable laws of God have
primacy and God is the ultimate authority in the affairs of humankind.
But republican system is based on man-made laws, which the legislative
bodies can repeal, change or create. Thus God-made laws and man-made
laws have different sources and different points of reference.
Obviously, a theocracy can never be a republic and a republic cannot be a
theocracy because they are fundamentally different entities. To claim that they
are the same or supplement each other is nonsensical confusion that
goes against logic and common sense. Those who make such flimsy
claims misuse the name of a world-religon, Islam in this case, and
also distort the meaning of republican democracy.

–Nasir Khan Editor

—

Hassan N. Gardezi, Viewpoint online, Online Issue No. 103

In 1956 when Pakistan finally
got its first constitution Objective Resolution was used to name the
country Islamic Republic of Pakistan. When the 1956 constitution was
revoked and Gen. Ayub seized power, he dropped the word “Islamic” from
the name of the country, only to reinstate it when mullahs protested

At the time of independence and partition in 1947, India took the
secular route, enacted a constitution in November 1949 and embarked on
its career as a republic. Pakistan’s Muslim League leaders on the other
hand got bogged down in their attempt to give their new-found state a
religious whitewash. By 1949 they were able to enact through the
Constituent Assembly what is known as the “Objectives Resolution,” a
controversial measure aimed at giving Pakistan an Islamic complexion.
Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan introduced the Objectives Resolution
(O.R. from now on) in the Constituent Assembly, deemed to be the charter
document for making Pakistan into an Islamic state, with a lengthy
speech in English which was clearly defensive in its semantics and
argument, although never viewed as such.

The rule of law is rapidly breaking down at the top levels of our
government. As officers of the court, we have sworn to “support the
Constitution,” which clearly implies an affirmative commitment on our
part.
Take the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The
conservative American Bar Association sent three white papers to
President Bush describing his continual unconstitutional policies. Then
and now civil liberties groups and a few law professors, such as the
stalwart David Cole of Georgetown University and Jonathan Turley of
George Washington University, have distinguished themselves in calling
out both presidents for such violations and the necessity for enforcing
the rule of law.

Sadly, the bulk of our profession, as individuals and through their
bar associations, has remained quietly on the sidelines. They have
turned away from their role as “first-responders” to protect the
Constitution from its official violators.

Friday, June 01, 2012

On May 29, The New York Times published an extraordinarily
in-depth look at the intimate role President Obama has played in
authorizing US drone attacks overseas, particularly in Pakistan, Yemen
and Somalia. It is chilling to read the cold, macabre ease with which
the President and his staff decide who will live or die. The fate of
people living thousands of miles away is decided by a group of
Americans, elected and unelected, who don’t speak their language, don’t
know their culture, don’t understand their motives or values. While
purporting to represent the world’s greatest democracy, US leaders are
putting people on a hit list who are as young as 17, people who are
given no chance to surrender, and certainly no chance to be tried in a
court of law.